Paperback Row

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By Joumana Khatib

Aug. 18, 2017

Six new paperbacks to check out this week.

THE FIRE THIS TIME:A New Generation Speaks About Race.Edited by Jesmyn Ward. (Scribner, $16.) With James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” as a lodestar, this collection examines the past, present and future of blackness in the United States, including poems and essays from Claudia Rankine, Isabel Wilkerson, Natasha Trethewey and Edwidge Danticat, among other authors.

CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY,by Thomas Piketty. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. (Belknap/Harvard University, $19.95.) A French economist analyzes centuries of wealth distribution and social trends — particularly as money is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer elites — and predicts outcomes, with sobering results: destabilized democracies and ever-wider inequalities. Piketty offers solutions, including the imposition of a wealth tax.

THE CHOSEN ONES,by Steve Sem-Sandberg. Translated by Anna Paterson. (Picador, $18.) A Swedish writer examines the horrors of a clinic in Vienna, Am Spiegelgrund, which during the 1940s killed nearly 800 children as part of a Nazi program. The children of Sem-Sandberg’s novel were selected for death, and the narrative details the unspeakable horrors they endured; the central figure, Adrian Ziegler — a child based on a real person — survives this torture, and the story follows him decades after the war.

HOW I BECAME A NORTH KOREAN,by Krys Lee. (Penguin, $16.) In this debut novel, three characters meet by chance on the Chinese border in their attempts to flee. Danny, a gay Chinese-American, falls in love with Yongju, the son of an elite family in the North. Jangmi, who sold herself into marriage to pay traffickers to get her to China, is pregnant and desperate to begin anew.

MILLER’S VALLEY,by Anna Quindlen. (Random House, $17.) At the outset of this novel, Mimi Miller is 11 and land that has been in her family for generations is under siege; they face the wrenching choice to leave. As our reviewer, Caroline Leavitt, said: “Quindlen makes her characters so richly alive, so believable, that it’s impossible not to feel every doubt and dream they harbor, or share every tragedy that befalls them.”